GeForce GTX 1660 Ti vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 290, which features a core clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 512-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2560 SPUs, 160 TAUs, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 1660 Ti		120 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 180 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 290, in theory, should be just a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 1660 Ti		294912 MB/sec
	Difference: 25088 (9%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1660 Ti will be just a bit (about 13%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1660 Ti		144000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16000 (13%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is superior to the Radeon R9 290, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1660 Ti		72000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20800 (41%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.